


Red Light District

by DesdemonaKaylose



Series: Collected: The Carmella Continuities [1]
Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Pre-Canon, Prostitution, urban gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-01
Updated: 2011-01-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 03:37:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4904122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Light glints off the young man's hair and nails, like a bloody halo. "Are the kisses free?" Edgar asks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Light District

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of my older stories that I had been meaning to import from FFnet. It was one of my first attempts at aesthetic in fanfic.

Edgar Vargas leaves the bar at 2AM on a weekday night, hearing the voice of a televangelist in the back of his head like a soundtrack he never chose to play. Cars pass him, but not too many. The city is as quiet as a predator watching intently from the shadows.

The street is spinning. He's really not that drunk, swear to God, he lost count of the glasses he downed but he's not that drunk, he's done worse. That's normal, and he's done worse. Often. It's why he doesn't bother with the car anymore. His vision is spinning with hellfire and damnation, or maybe it's just the red neon stretching out above him—hellfire and damnation, not for him, not even for the bartender who kicked him out: hellfire and damnation just for the sake of it, contemplating its own existence in the universe.

Looming, dripping, ebbing and flowing like stygian tides. He was like this hours ago, before he stumbled into the bar and shattered the Sunday evening stillness with a soft demand for vodka— _no, whiskey_ , _surely you have that somewhere_. The tide was coming in hours ago, staining everything in his placid world redder than the neon lights, and the drinks only cut him loose from the moorings of his routine. His world. His physical, predictable, utterly mundane real life.

And now he's awash somewhere else, spinning. Sometimes a philosophical mood comes at you with all the stealth and violence of a street mugging, and all you can do is let go and roll with it to save yourself some bruises.

He shivers, and all the city sounds transform into a hissing chorus. A pulse that can't be his thrums like a drumbeat.

Which way home?

Where is he?

Hellfire, the soundtrack says, and damnation.

Someone is watching him from a nearby window—he can feel their eyes on him, which is something he can't do sober. He's honestly not that drunk, though, not as drunk as he'd like to be. He can still walk fine, he can still talk fine. Can still think… well, he can still think.

He stops underneath a window, leaning desperately against worn brick, not caring what the other people on the street might say. They aren't real anyway. Enlightened as the liquor has made him, he realizes that the man-shaped figures around him are little more than scenery. Two dimensional ornamentation. He's not sure why he didn't see it sooner. It's so clear now.

The brick scrapes against his fingers. A lot more sets him off these days: anniversaries of deaths, stories in the newspaper, the empty seat at his kitchen table, gossip in the reception hall of his church… It's like he's walking on eggshells, trying to make himself believe that the good really does outweigh the bad, after all. He is not living in a shiny clean world.

He closes his eyes for a second, a blink that lasts longer than it ought to, and presses back into the wall. If he can feel it, he can know it's real. That's what the world is now, whatever he can touch and the mad spinning in his head.

He feels a palm splayed across his chest, not his own, and there's something new in his world, tonight.

Eyes are locked on his eyes, grey or maybe blue reflecting hellfire neon. Black kohl, smeared across the eyelid and underneath the lashes so that they almost seem to float. Maybe that's just the alcohol talking.

"Hey there," murmur the thin lips, teeth glinting, slurring on the vowels. "Y'look alone, stranger."

He blinks, faster this time, trying to assimilate the six feet of red-on-white skin and tight jeans into his unhinged worldview. "My name's Edgar," he murmurs back, because that's how his mother raised him. "And you have no idea."

Assimilation complete. The boy in front of him is thin, like a vogue model, and his exposed collar bone is mottled with every shade of fading bruise. His lips quirk up in the beginning of a sardonic smile, and that twitch nearly blinds Edgar before the boy settles back into his original dull-eyed smirk. His black nails dig into Edgar's cheek, tight jeans push against his pelvis. The boy presses in against him, replacing the oxygen Edgar is attempting to breathe with his breath, and everything crackles with heat and electricity.

"Well, _Edgar_ ," the kid purrs, "I'm good company for a Sunday night. Half price, handsome. I'll burn that holy water right out of you. Fuck you till you scream."

It's really all that Edgar can do to keep breathing—suddenly hot air, the scent of sex and darkness. He's got a pretty good idea where he is though, now. The boy looks like a shark, spiked hair and fishnet, like a lean predator. There's a violent edge in his voice like a serrated knife, and it promises blood and sin and everything people die to keep chained down in the dark Freudian corners of their minds. His pitch has the rhythmic sound of an oft-repeated chant.

Edgar hardly notices that he's pressing himself into the hand on his cheek.

"How about it?" the kid asks, trailing those magnetic fingers down Edgar's neck, over vulnerable flesh. His eyes bore into the older man's, and it's not certain whether he's whispering or it's just a drunk man's imagination filling in wordless intentions.

_I can make you scream. I can show you secrets that make simply breathing into something sweet as fucking, I can break you, I can shake you, I 'll show you what no one else ever could, and all for a token fee…_

"Oh," Edgar breathes, "Oh, you're good."

The kid looks a little pleased. Irregular teeth glint in a tight smile, hips shift against hips just enough to spark but not enough to burn.

"I got a private room," the lean figure grins. "Come up with me. Make it worth your while, promise."

Edgar reaches out and cups the kid's cheekbone, brushing a silver earring. The world isn't spinning anymore, and he's grateful for that. Something about the streetwalker slowed it down, anchored it even.

"No," he whispers, leaning forward. My, he's brave tonight.

The young man opens his mouth, pauses, frowns. "What?"

"No," Edgar repeats, smiling . "I won't be coming up with you."

The young man reaches down between them, a sharp motion that ends with him palming Edgar's hardness. He relaxes against Edgar at the reassurance of the find. Curiosity wars with confusion; surprisingly, he doesn't pull away. "But… why?"

"I think you might be the Devil," Edgar replies. "And I'm not done with my soul, not yet." He breathes in the sex and heat, the electricity. The flood of hellfire and damnation stopped at the young man's feet, held at bay by invisible walls.

"Are the kisses free?" he asks, watching the vermilion light glinting off the young man's hair and nails, like a bloody halo. _I'd like to taste darkness_.

The dull expression is gone now, replaced by a kind of shocked amusement. The younger man leans closer, his thin lips twitching upward again in that aborted smile.

"Not usually," he slurs, "but, maybe for you. Juss once. Nobody say I ain't generous."

And his mouth tastes like cigarettes and salt and coca-cola, and Edgar realizes that he is in fact drunker than he thought, because underneath it all, he's certain he can taste the elusive flavor of darkness.

It's sweet.

~x~

Weeks later, in much the same fashion, Edgar finds himself wandering down the same street. This time he's nearly sober, perhaps tipsy. He suspects that he was slurring himself, the last time he walked this way, although it's hard to hear yourself talk over the din of your own thoughts. This time, though, he was careful not to have more than four drinks, which in truth is hardly worth leaving home for.

Red neon tells him he's on the right path. He couldn't have come back here on a normal evening, but the hellfire and damnation was rising again to drown him and a desperate man is braver than a complacent one. He keeps thinking about grey eyes, red glowing stripes reflected at the corners—sweat-smeared makeup, bruised skin, the spark of a real smile. Pride and apathy.

With a flickering glance at the rest of the street, Edgar slides into the corner of a brick wall and cracking cement stairs, a familiar niche with a familiar feel against his skin. Gritty and irregular.

And he waits.

Soon enough, a figure slides in beside him. It rests a bare back against the brick, cocks a brow at him.

"Well if it ain't the one who got away. Decided to take me up on that offer? Still valid, y'know."

Edgar shakes his head. It's one thing to imagine, another to act. Most likely, he never will.

"Why come, then?" the younger man asks, and this time the only thing slowing his words is a natural drawl.

Edgar considers trying to explain hellfire and damnation, but he doesn't think he can put words to the crux of what he's struggling with. It's difficult to name something when you won't look it in the eye.

"I like seeing the Devil in person," he replies instead, "It feels good to be tempted."

"You're crazy," the younger man observes, but there's a light in his eyes that has nothing to do with the neon.

"Probably. What about you?"

The streetwalker reaches into his pocket for a cigarette, tapping one out of a nearly empty pack. "Fuckin' nuts," he answers, with a grin. "I feel it all shakin' apart every time I breathe. I got a vengeance complex, I'm gonna lose it for good one day."

The younger man refocuses on a target, a woman down the street. His eyes go dull again, and he smiles that shark smile.

"Business is callin'—that is, unless you wanna come up with me after all. I'm the best on the street."

"No," Edgar repeats, almost wistful. "Tell me your name?"

The younger man narrows his eyes. "Come up with me."

"Is that the trade off?"

"Yeah, looks like it."

Edgar steps away from the wall, grit clinging to his raw fingers.

"Then it seems we are at an impasse."

~x~

Sometimes the wanting is a better thing than the having. It is illogical, but often true. Sometimes, the sweetness of aching for something is satisfaction enough, and the scent of a feast makes starvation all the better.

Edgar suspects that he might be a bit of a masochist.

But there's something about the young man with the glittering eyes and the crooked, sharp smile that keeps him coming back, and it's not entirely the scent of sex and the brush of lean hips. There's something in the way that mindless sensuality sharpens into cynical wit, and it makes him wonder, makes him linger.

So he returns, awash in the tide of hellfire and damnation.

~x~

"Sex is love," says Edgar, drunk again.

"Sex is power," the streetwalker counters, sober enough.

"You must be a king, then," Edgar says, running his gaze down the now familiar form.

"Not yet," the younger man replies, "but 'm gettin' there."

~x~

"Tell me your name."

"Come back with me."

~x~

"I don't feel like a real person," Edgar admits, less intoxicated this time and more unhinged.

"What, like people don't see you?"

"No, no. More like I'm walking on a different plane of existence." He runs a finger over the sharp edge of a brick. "The moon isn't real, you know. You can't touch it. It's just an idea."

"Never thought about it like that."

~x~

"Please, just tell me your name."

"Come upstairs with me."

~x~

"They think they own me," the younger man says, stumbling, barely caring. "They think they buy me."

"They don't?"

"Hell no," the streetwalker slurs. "They pay me to own _them_ , drag 'em down somewhere they can't go alone."

Edgar nods. "A guided tour of damnation."

"You'd like it," the younger man tells him, fixing him with a dizzying half smile. "You'd like it if you tried it. I'd take special care with you."

~x~

"Just one word."

"Just one fuck."

~x~

"I'm not afraid to die," Edgar says, and he feels like he's looking at the world through the clearest magnifying glass in creation. Lucidity is just within his grasp.

"Really."

"Really. I think it would be a relief, in a way. To finally know."

"Know what?"

"If I'm really as good as I think I am."

~x~

"Tell me your name."

"Come back with me."

~x~

"I'm not afraid to kill," the streetwalker says, uncorking a hidden flask. He's generous, in his own way.

"No?"

"No. I think it'd be a relief. To finally know."

"…know what?"

The younger man winks, manic tightness just under his skin. "If I'm really as bad as I think I am."

~x~

Edgar waits alone in the hidden niche along the city's worst street. Sometimes it takes a long time before the younger man is free, nights when he comes stumbling out of the building across the street smelling like sex, disheveled and elegant. He can be anything you want, anything you need, whatever will take you to that heart of darkness and leave you screaming for more. God only knows what he is in the daylight, but under streetlights on concrete avenues, he's the devil in the flesh.

And Edgar waits alone. The boys and girls in the redlight district know better than to approach him, so he watches them go, wondering if they're all like his personal Satan. Somehow, he doubts it.

He wonders how they know not to approach him. Is there a mark somewhere he can't see, a tag that says he belongs to someone else? That he's someone else's kill? Did that first kiss promise him some kind of protection, guarantee him one apple for the garden?

Perhaps.

His streetwalker comes stumbling up to him moments later, smelling so strongly of alcohol that even Edgar—inundated Edgar—can practically taste it. He loops bruised arms around the older man's shoulders, licking his thin lips thoughtlessly. His eyes are blank, dimmer than ever before.

" _Edgar_ ," the younger man breathes, and it's a surprise that he remembers the name after all this time. He's never said it before.

Hesitant, Edgar places a hand on the exposed hip, fingers twisting through draping fishnet. Electricity burns his skin.

"Come up with me," the younger man slurrs, familiar and unfamiliar, "just come up with me. I'm not gonna charge you, I'm not gonna fuckin' _charge_ _you_ … Edgar, come back with me."

"I… I don't understand. Do you want power over me? Is that what this is about?"

Jimmy drags them closer, filling up the world with his body. "I want to feel you," he whispers, "I want to see the face you make when you come. I wanna make you scream, Edgar."

He leans closer, until his lips brush against his prey's, leaving ghost traces of blood and alcohol.

"I want you to see me," he breathes.

And Edgar can feel the same wind that tosses Dante's lovers trapped in Hell, he can feel it rising up around his heels and maybe that's what's been holding back the hellfire and damnation, all this time. Damnation versus damnation. The kid's grey eyes burn into his own, but he can't shake the dullness lingering there. Can't stand it. He's seen light and blinding dark, he's seen it all and he can't settle for less now.

He bridges the gap.

A kiss is something else entirely. He's done some research, since that first night, and he's learned that a body for hire costs twice as much for a kiss. A body is cheap, a kiss is a much rarer commodity. He likes the taste of _almost having_ , which is the taste of promises and hunger and eternity. He likes the taste of a dream deferred.

The younger man pulls back first, and there's a fire in his eyes that burns equal parts dark and light.

"My name," he mutters, "my name's Jimmy."

"Pleased to meet you," Edgar replies, softly.

The world is spinning, turning upsidedown, shaken by the waves. And he finds, in a moment of whirling insight, that he feels suddenly less willing to die.

~x~


End file.
